So we’ve been busy the last couple of weeks working on some minor bug fixes, enhancements, new pages, new Ad Code functionality, and our first contest (which is more than halfway over for those not paying attention to the dates). Heres a quick summary of some of the changes that were released in the past couple of hours:

• Custom Color Tool: So we realized that not everyone that uses our site is fluent in HTML and some people were having a difficult time customizing our Ads to match the color scheme of their page. So we decided to roll out a simple color selection tool that will allow you to easily choose the colors that you would like for your ad. You will be able to specify colors for
  the Title, Description Text, Link, Background, Border and the Body (area outside and between your ads). You can update your current campaigns and select colors or when you create a new site the color selection tool will be available. For those of you who like to edit your HTML by hand, this is totally cool as well, and you don’t have to worry about using this tool or changing your existing ads.
• Individual Site Exclusion: We were receiving quite a few emails from users who noticed that certain Ads were appearing on their page that didn’t quite sit well with them. So rather than forcing you to go to adgridwork.com, log into your account, edit your site, and add a domain to the exclusion list, we have bundled this entire process directly into your Ad Code. So now when you see an Ad that you don’t like, simply Right-Click on the Ad, enter your adgridwork Password into the password field, and hit Go! This will automatically add the Advertisement into your exclusion list and you won’t ever see it on your page again!
• New Pages: We added a few new pages to the site over the past week including our Press page and the Top Sites page. While these pages aren’t particularly exciting, the Press page gives you a glimpse of what some of the Blogs and Websites out there are saying about adgridwork and the Top Sites page showcases (in real-time) the Top Sites on our network. We figured its good to gloat about our own site and the top Sites once in a while, right?
• Spread the Cheer - Holiday Competition: For those of you who haven’t logged in in some time, you may have missed the launch of our Holiday Competition. Basically, we are giving all of our users a chance at earning 50 dollars and a top ranking for the whole month of January (your Ad will be served 20% of the time)! All of the information is available on the Competition page including rules and all the prizes. There are still a few days left until we tally the results so get out there and start recruiting!

Well that pretty much sums it up for now. Like always, we are always looking for your feedback and suggestions so Get at Us with your thoughts. And finally, we’d like to thank everyone out there who have helped build the World’s First Free and Targeted Advertising Network. It’s amazing to see all of the sites on the network working together to promote one another. Simply amazing!

Alright everybody, lots of upgrades to announce, including some big enhancements (we believe, anyway) that a lot of users had been requesting. We haven’t posted to the news in a few days, but we have been working hard nonetheless. Some of these upgrades have even been out since yesterday; we just waited to put everything into one big news post. It’s really late now, and I’ve been up for nearly 24 hours, so if there are any problems with the new features, make sure to email them to us. I’ve been testing for the last 2 hours, but you never know :-). So, without further ado, here’s the full rundown of the changes:

• New Ad Block Sizes!: That’s right, we finally got around to adding different size blocks. We’ve had many requests for lots of different sizes; we now have most of Google’s standard block sizes, though we do not have any blocks with widths less than 160 px as we had to shrink the ads to a basically unreadable font and we did not want to add any further limitations on the size of the ad text. The full list of new sizes is as follows: 728×90, 468×60, 234×60, 160×600, 300×250, 336×280, 250×250, and 180×150. If anybody needs a size that we still do not offer, email us and we’ll see if we can add it to our selection.
• Adult Content: OK, now before anybody gets offended and emails us, the adult content has its own network. That’s right, we have added an adult content network; now when you create a new site, you can mark it as an adult-content site, and you will get a different list of categories to select from. When you add an adult-content site, your ad will only be shown on other adult-content sites, and your site will only show other adult-content ads. We decided to bypass any type of per-site or per-user allowance of adult sites and instead create a whole separate network. This way, those of you that want nothing to do with adult-content can use adgridwork the way you have been without thinking twice. Some people might wish we had stayed out of the adult market, but this move was done in large part to protect our users. We found some adult sites that placed ads in the network, even though that was against our Terms of Service. We removed the ones we found (thank you to those users that calmly and respectfully pointed out some inappropriate ads out there), but as the network grows we know we won’t be able to keep track of all the sites. Hence we now have a separate adult network. If any users find adult ads displayed in the general network (either because they got on the network before we added the new categories or they’re simply being jerks and ignoring the adult network) please email us and we will move them immediately.
• Google AdSense: We’ve had more than a few users want to know if our ads can be displayed on pages with AdSense ads. Until yesterday, the answer was no they cannot since Google prevents you from displaying any other targeted ads on a page with AdSense (if it was up to us, we wouldn’t care :-). We understand many of you are probably already running AdSense, and might not feel comfortable replacing your Google ads just quite yet with our smaller (but growing!) network. To accommodate, when adding a site we now allow you to mark it as an AdSense site, and instead of showing targeted ads on your site, completely random ads from our network (general or adult, whichever group your site is in, not both). This allows you to run both AdSense and adgridwork without violating Google’s ToS on the same page.
• Smaller updates: We added some categories per user requests, including Web Services: Proxy Sites, Web Services: Tutorials, Health and Beauty: Addictions, and Art/Photo/Music: Sewing. We also now have a special category request link on the add/update site page. If you don’t see a category that fits your site, just click the link, type your suggestion, and we’ll have your suggestion immediately. Finally, not sure if anybody besides us noticed this, but occasionally the ad block would load without display ads. There was a logic problem in our ad display code which has now been fixed, so the blocks should load correctly every time now (barring unforeseen major traffic congestion; our database is getting a huge number of hits every day).

Those are all the upgrades for now, if there’s other things people want to see, please email us. The only reason we run this site is to provide a service to our users, so we love hearing all of your feature suggestions. We will keep working on updates, including possibly a forum and an improved ranking system, so until next time, thank you for using adgridwork and we hope the recent changes make our service a better fit for our users.

That’s right everyone, we have just released new ad code. The old ad code will still function, but the new code addresses some bugs with the iframe in IE/Opera. People pointed out to us that our ads had an ugly white border in IE and Opera on sites with non-white backgrounds. This was due to the fact that we had no margins set in our iframe, and IE and Opera apparently has a default margin that is nonzero. The new Ad Code sets the margins to 0, and it also gives the user the ability to control one more color variable, called body_color, which controls the color behind the ads. So no more hideous offsets in our ad blocks. If anyone has any questions or there are any other problems with the displays, shoot us an email. Thanks all.

So we’ve been up late implementing some updates to the site, which are detailed below. We still have a list of things we’re working on, most of which has been suggested to us by our users. As always, if there are things you want to see added to the site or there is a problem with some of the newly added features, please go to the Contact page and let us know. We want to make this site as functional and convenient as possible. So without further ado, here are all the changes since launch yesterday:

• We now have a profanity filter! Now when you submit your ad, we check for inappropriate words or content in your text. Got to keep the site clean for the kiddies. Obviously, we won’t catch every inappropriate or offensive word, and some ads could have slipped through yesterday before the filter was put up, so if you see something you don’t like, send us an email
  and we’ll look into it. We want to make sure our users are comfortable with the ads they’re hosting on their sites. Down the road we might implement some type of automatic reporting system for inappropriate content or abuse, but for now this seems to work pretty well.
• Going along with the above, the display url and target url of your ads must have the same domain. No, this does NOT mean you can no longer have your ads link to a site that is different from the site you registered with, this is simply a way to protect our users from clicking on ads that claim to be for www.dianescutepuppies.com only to find themselves
  taken to www.berthashouseofstrangefetishes.com. Some people probably didn’t even realize the display and target url’s could be on different domains, but in the spirit of full disclosure to our users, we’re laying out all the details for those people that are interested.
• A few people pointed out that our character cutoff was sometimes too long for the ads, allowing the lines to break and made the ad size change, resulting in a quite ugly display. The ads now have hidden overflows, so IF YOU MAKE YOUR AD TOO BIG IT WILL GET CUT OFF when it’s displayed. So when you’re adding/updating your site, if the ad text doesn’t display correctly in the preview pane on the right-hand side, than it will not display correctly on the network sites, so please pay attention to this. We’re sorry to ads already in the system that will be cut off due to this change, but we felt this was better than lowering the character limit below 40. Everyone needs enough space to get their message across right?
• Our Contact page now has a nice ajax progress bar when you submit your message. We noticed during high traffic the page would sit there for a few seconds with no signal that your message was being sent. Just a small touch-up.
• Finally, we have added some categories. The new categories were all requested by our users. They are as follows: Books/Media: Anime, Legal: Law Enforcement/Private Investigators, and Art/Photo/Music: Graphics/Design. Also Games and Toys: Games was changed to Games and Toys: Games and Video Games. If anybody has any other categories they want to see added (or a sub-category you think is just in the wrong place), as always, email us and we’ll get right on it.

That should be all of the updates for tonight. We’ll add an update if we forgot anything. Here’s a list of some things that are ‘coming soon’ if you will.

• A couple users suggested on digg that we move the “Advertise on this page” link to outside of the actual ad, to prevent the subtle resizing that occurs on the right-most ad. This would have been rolled out in the changes today except for a bug we encountered when displaying them in IE. So it didn’t quite make the cut before we passed out, so look for
  this tomorrow.
• Different size ad blocks. We’ve had requests for smaller ad blocks, as small as 150px width vertical blocks. We hope to get some more block options out there soon.
• Adult Content.We have received requests to have adult content categories on our network as well. This is a large market that we are currently excluding/ignoring, which is not fair. We do however understand that some of our users do not want this type of content advertised on their sites, so there will obviously be a way to prevent adult content ads from being displayed on
  non-adult sites, either on a user-by-user basis or complete category separation. Feel free to email us with your thoughts; again we always do our best to listen to our users.
• Multiple categoriesSomething that has been suggested and that we have wanted to do for awhile is to allow users to associate their site with multiple categories. This is something we will definitely do; it involves slight modifications to our database storage, which is why it has not happened yet. So be patient and it will come soon.
• Big Picture:We have some big picture plans, which will hopefully make their way into the site sometime in the near future. High on that list is a general and/or help forum, to go along with our spiffy life chat. Some users have suggested a forum, and others have pointed out some drawbacks to our chat system. In addition, we have been made aware that our site is not screen reader compliant. Those of you with experience in developing websites know how hard it is to maintain a site, especially when conforming to standards (we have our share of deprecated HTML tags on this site…sshhh…). That, coupled with our large use of JavaScript and dynamic page modifications, make it hard to be compliant. Nevertheless, we do not mean to exclude anybody from our service, so we will do our best to resolve this problem as best we can. Sorry to those that cannot make good use of the service in its current state.

That about does it for the upgrades and plans. As always, email us with your suggestions, concerns, or general observations. Overall we think we had a pretty successful first day. Thank you to everybody who signed up or messaged us. We really appreciate your support. See everyone on the chat tomorrow; seeing how late it is tonight, we may not be responsive early in the morning, but we will do our best to answer all emails and questions asap. Thanks everyone, and good luck with your campaigns!